Thursday, January 29, 2015

Life is a Mix of Good and Bad

Last year my 12-year-old niece and I started a “reading club”—it’s an exclusive club, just the two of us. It’s
been a lot of fun, and it’s given me an interesting insight into her life and the
things she thinks about. It’s also given me a chance to read some wonderful
young-adult novels that I would never have known about otherwise.

Last summer three of the books
we read were A Wrinkle in Time (which
I had read when I was a teen-ager), Where
the Mountain meets the Moon, and Tuck Everlasting, and an interesting theme
emerged from these three very different books: an understanding of Taoist
principles, in particular the yin-yang aspect of life.

What I realized was that I have
a tendency to dream about and work for a life where there are no problems; a
utopian vision of sunshine and happiness everlasting. And I don’t think I’m
alone with this tendency. We dream about our relationships—our fairy-tales end
with the couple riding off into the sunset, living “happily ever after.” Our
politicians prey on this thinking, promising us that they will deliver the
policies that will solve all of our problems. Many of us work hard all our
lives, building a retirement fund that we imagine will finance living the life
of our dreams, free of stress and hassle.

But these dreams always set us
up for disappointment, because they are based on the flawed belief that there
can be a situation with just one side of the yin-yang polarity—that we can have
good without bad, happy without sad, love without grief, joy without
heartbreak.

Reading these books left me with
this piece of wisdom: everything is a mix of good and bad. Allow for that,
embrace it. Quit your pursuit of that unattainable, nothing-but-happiness
rainbow.

When my niece and I discussed A Wrinkle in Time, I mentioned that once
again we were hearing the Taoist message. She said, “Mom and I went on a hike
this morning and I asked her, ‘Do you like going up or down better?’ and she
replied, ‘if you do one you’re going to have to do the other!’”

In response to the realization
that life is a mix of good and bad, many people turn to Eastern religions and
their promise to help you deal with the “negative” side of life through
detachment. You can learn to become a witness of your own life and not let the
problems bother you. You can become invulnerable to emotions of sadness, grief,
loss, anger, etc. This sounds really good, particularly when we are suffering
from some loss, but is it really what we want? Is there a cost to standing
outside the yin-yang of life?

Tuck Everlasting is about a family who inadvertently drink from a
spring that gives eternal life. They see their deathlessness as a curse and
work to prevent the knowledge of the spring getting out. There’s a beautiful
passage where the father of the family explains to the young female protagonist
why life without death is a bad thing.

A Wrinkle in Time conveys the message that without unhappiness
there can be no happiness. The novel tells the story of three children who travel
to a planet, Camazotz, where their father has been imprisoned. There’s a
powerful computer, IT, that has controlled the minds of everyone on the planet,
and all the inhabitants live in lock step to IT. One of the children’s minds
gets taken over by IT, and his sister Meg has this conversation with him:

Charles Wallace’s strange,
monotonous voice ground against her ears…“Why do you think we have wars at
home? Why do you think people get confused and unhappy? Because they all live
their own, separate, individual lives…on Camazotz individuals have been done
away with. Camazotz is ONE mind. It’s IT. And that’s why everybody’s so happy
and efficient.”

…Meg shook her head violently.
“No!” she shouted. “I know our world isn’t perfect, Charles, but it’s better
than this. This isn’t the only alternative! It can’t be!

“Nobody suffers here,” Charles
intoned. “Nobody is ever unhappy.”

“But nobody’s ever happy,
either,” Meg said earnestly. “Maybe if you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t
know how to be happy.”

Is it possible that to fully experience
life we need to stay immersed in the positive-negative duality? Todd May, a
professor of philosophy at Clemson University wrote a beautiful essay published in the New York Times about this idea. He
writes that many Eastern religions and some philosophies, including Stoicism,
teach “invulnerabilism”:

They say that we can, and we
should, make ourselves immune to the world’s vicissitudes. What is central to
invulnerabilist views is the belief that we can extricate ourselves from the
world’s contingencies so that they do not affect us. We are capable of making
ourselves immune to the fortunes of our bodies, our thoughts, and our
environment, and we will live better or happier or more pure lives if we do so.
Whether the task involves the abolition of desire, the elimination of emotion
or the recognition of the ultimate oneness of all things, the guiding idea is
that we can and ought to make ourselves invulnerable to the world’s vagaries.

But, Mr. May asks, is this what we
really want?

Invulnerabilism recommends that
we secrete a distance between ourselves and the world so that ultimately it
cannot touch us. The extremity of such a view can be illustrated by reference
to the Stoic’s ratification of the ancient philosopher Anaxagoras’ reported
remark upon hearing of his son’s death: “I always knew that my child was a
mortal.” It is possible perhaps that some few among us can reach this degree of
distance from the world. But the question is, do we want it? I suspect I am not
alone in thinking that the death of one of my children should shatter me, even
if it should not ultimately destroy me.

Most of us want to feel caught
up in the world. We want to feel gripped by what we do and those we care about,
involved with them, taken up by them. The price of this involvement is our
vulnerability. We must stand prepared to feel the loss of what we care about,
because that is part of what it means to care. Caring requires desiring for the
sake of others, which in an uncertain world entails that that desiring can be frustrated.

Maybe these religions and
philosophies can help us learn how to avoid being overwhelmed by our negative
emotions, but I agree with Mr. Todd that vulnerability is essential to the full
experience of being alive.

Life is a mix of good and bad. Embrace it.

Update February 9, 2015:

My husband Arthur has gently pointed out to me that there's a bit of judgement here--maybe I'm putting too much reality on "good" and "bad." Maybe the real reason life is a mix of good and bad is because we often are confused about which is which! There's a lovely Chinese story about this confusion, called "Who Knows What is Good or Bad," see my blog post about this idea.

2 comments:

This is a wonderful combination of your ideas and thoughts, and those of others. We have a new puppy, now just past a year old, who has taught me to run a bit, and chase sticks (OK, I throw & he chases..). And now, in love with the spirit of this new companion, I worry about his safety - about getting hit by cars, or shot by neighbors (which happened to another beloved pet) - so I ebb & flow w/ concerns. But I recognize that mortality, threats & pain are ever-present. Gotta accept that, and simply throw more sticks, with great gusto. Your writing helps confirm and cement that understanding. Thanks so much for expressing so well.

About Me

I'm a philosopher, writer, videographer, and entrepreneur. In 2013 I've released a new book, "We Are ALL Innocent by Reason of Insanity." I'm the co-author with my husband Arthur Hancock of "The Game of God: Recovering Your True Identity.